2024

15 July, 2024. 824 words.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 07/08

08:18 # I recorded well over 250 videos of Elden Ring, took meticulous notes on every single one of them (well, almost all of them), and yet I cannot find where I found or explored the Wyndham Catacombs. That’s where a tier 1 spirit ash bell bearing is located. Somehow I had unlocked the site of grace but never gotten the bell bearing. Weird. I didn’t do very much off-camera with that character but I guess that was one of the things. Or maybe the game unlocked the site of grace for me, and I’d never actually been there? Is that possible? The inside looked vaguely familiar, though, but then a lot of catacombs look vaguely the same.
08:39 # Oh neat. My blog failed to deploy and AWS has changed their entire Amplify UI so I can’t find anything.
09:58 # I’m very pleased to see more and more people venturing forth with my long-held opinion that blog comments aren’t a very useful medium in the modern world anymore. At least the WordPress-style blog comments. I keep wondering if there’s a way to recapture something useful out of the concept of comments– modernizing it, evolving it, changing it, something, but I have yet to think of anything. The main problem is that the list of cons for comments is about 10 times longer than the list of pros for comments. I keep thinking of writing a post “the top 10 reasons web site owners should not implement comments,” the only listicle I’ve ever considered writing.

12:09 # I’ve finally become energized enough to play the Elden Ring DLC. Have made some more progress, killed a few more bosses (Ancient Dragon-Man, Death Knight). Having learned from playing the main game, I’m probing the boundaries of the play area for the paths of least resistance, and turning back as soon as I encounter difficulty, until I can find no other paths to take. Implementing a sort of a human hierarchical search algorithm.
12:13 # Yesterday I had another lesson in “expect and plan for human error in video recording” with OBS. I rigged up a text overlay to display a list of the loose ends I’m tracking in Elden Ring, intending to bring it up briefly to show the viewers. Of course, as I had done many many times before, I forgot to turn off the overlay for like 10 minutes, because I’m watching the game and not the OBS preview. Completely ruined the video, no way to recover. I’ve now implemented a script I found that will automatically hide the overlay after 10 seconds if I forgot to do it myself. Should have done that from the beginning.

11:00 # Can we chat for a moment about how much the story boss fights suck in Elden Ring? Ok thanks. They suck. This insistence on having the bosses do these frickin 10 hit combos, where each hit will take a good quarter or a third of your health off, and each swing has a different fake-out timing. And how they never stand still so you can never actually hit them back. Combine that with all the infamous built-in From Software lag which makes instantaneous reactions basically impossible. So the bosses have just been getter faster and faster with longer and longer combos, floating around defying all the rules of the game, while we the player are still stuck with the same old laggy attacks and dodges and blocks. They’ve really abandoned that whole thing of “tough but fair” thing and embraced a new “tough but unfair” philosophy.
- 11:13 # This impromptu rant has been brought to you by Rellana the Twin Moon Knight. Who I keep getting down to 10% health before she busts out some crazy random flurry of attacks or room-wide light show that just insta-kills me, Leda, and my spirit ashes.
- 11:17 # Incidentally, there is an argument to be made that fighting these bosses solo is easier than summoning help, because when the boss is focused on someone else, I actually get hit more standing behind them because of all the 180-degree backswings on every boss attack. It’s just that it’s more tedious and repetitious to keep practicing boss fights solo.

18:39 # I added a link at the top of the blog to my data-driven Elden Ring DLC progress page, which indexes each video I’ve recorded as I play the DLC, and gives a short description of each. I don’t know why I do these things, but it’s a fun exercise in getting Hugo to generate web pages out of json data files. Also, part of the fun of playing a From Software game blind is finding out how everyone else played through the content in wildly different ways from what you did. And it will be quite some time before I get around to actually uploading the videos.